Food Journeys
Great Pizza, Great Food, Great Drink, Great People
The quest for great pizza and enjoyment of good food started with a beer. A friend of mine came home from spending several months in Europe and brought home the German beer Dinkel Acker Dark. In retrospect, the beer was not great. However, it tasted like something with actual substance to it, as opposed to the straw flavored and watery beers often consumed as a means to a good time during early college years. Those few bottles of Dinkel Acker were the first steps into a world of flavors much different from the standardized tastes still inherent in many food and beverage items in America at the time. The year was 1991.
In California, Fritz Maytag had already resuscitated the Anchor Brewing Company in the late 60’s. Sierra Nevada had already been brewing beer for ten years and, back East, Samuel Adams had been brewing for seven years since beginning operations in 1984. At the time I had never seen, nor heard of, these three icons of American beer making in a liquor store.
Shortly after those bottles of Dinkel Acker, some friends and I discovered the Brickskeller, in Washington DC, and really got caught up in beers of all styles, with particular emphasis on pale ales and Belgian beers. Asking for a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale or Anchor Steam Porter from the local liquor store would have raised some eyebrows. Inquiring about a Rodenbach Grand Cru or Orval we discovered at the Brickskeller? Fuhgeht about it. Back in those days, it was not easy to find these beers at your local liquor store. The solution? Homebrew.
A quick look through the Yellow Pages and a road trip to Brew Masters in Rockville set us on the right path. With Charlie Papazian’s “The Complete Joy of Homebrewing” in our hands and an assortment of plastic buckets, siphon tubes and ingredients, two friends of mine and I made our first homebrew in an apartment in SouthWest Washington DC in 1992. In honor of that year’s Jamaican bobsled team in the Winter Olympics, the beer was dubbed Bobsled Brew and ended up being much better than I expected. The beer was in fact quite good and before long several of us had acquired our own brewing kits. We would each go on to separately make varying homebrews and for a couple of years we had an annual summer beer tasting, making everything from coriander and orange peel flavored Wit beers to Imperial Stouts. One of my friends would take classes at the Siebel Institute of Technology & World Brewing Academy in Chicago and ended up working for Baltimore’s Clipper City Beer from late 1997 to 1999 after a stint brewing beer in Wisconsin. I would go on to work for Brew Masters in Rockville and Clarendon, Virginia for a few years and learn more about the art of making beer. Some of us still brew to this day.
L to R: Rodenbach Grand Cru, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, De Dolle Oerbier, Orval Trappist Ale, Liefmans Goudenband
My curiosity in all of the various flavors of beer, along with the wonderful books by beer expert Michael Jackson, exploded my curiosity for the flavors and cultures behind other foods. While I enjoyed the different tastes and textures, learning about the history behind various food and drink, and the people who passionately made them, were as much a joy as the food itself.
Soon afterwards, exploring coffee became a passion. I can remember having to drive 45 minutes to find a coffee shop, in Montgomery Mall, which sold various whole beans. This was back in the day when even finding a shop with a moderate selection of single beans like Kenyan AA, Hawaiian Kona or Guatemalan Antigua was relatively difficult. It is still sometimes hard to believe we now have shops such as Zeke’s Coffee here in Baltimore offering dozens of beans from all over the globe, not to mention one bean which is first eaten, then pooped out of a cat as part of its evolution from bean to human lips!. A morning without the aroma of fresh coffee brewing is a sad one indeed – at least to a hopeless caffeine addict!
Cigars were also early in the mix, with trips down to Georgetown Tobacco becoming a much anticipated monthly ritual. Marvin R. Shanken’s Cigar Aficionado magazine became must reading. My first issue was the Autumn 1996 edition with Demi Moore on the cover. I thought it was, and still is, one of the sexiest covers and articles I have seen in a magazine. Of course anyone should be able to freely enjoy such a thing as a fine cigar! While I don’t smoke cigars nearly as much as I did back then, I still very much enjoy the occasional cigar.
Cigar Aficionado Demi Moore Cover
From 1991 through 1995, I worked for Uptown Bakers, which at the time was the largest baker of artisanal breads in and around Washington DC. I was blown away by the quality of the breads and pastries made there. It was here I fully appreciated the labor and attention to detail required to make great food on a consistent basis. Discovering the flavors of Plugra butter, varying cheeses, literal trash cans filled with chunked Belgian Callebaut chocolate and being able to enjoy all the excellent bread was eye opening. I talked with the two main bakers , who were French, about the making of bread and they helped me realize the making of artisinal bread is a very passionate endeavor not everyone can duplicate on a consistent basis. I didn’t quite realize it at the time, but Uptown Bakers was part of a cutting edge of various companies striving to re-introduce artisanal products to American palates. A literal explosion in craft made products of all types was about to occur.
Next door to the bakery, which is no longer at the former Cleveland Park location, was an Italian store named Vace Italian Deli which sold pizza. This was the first time I had pizza which had a little extra care put into it. In retrospect was it great pizza? No. But it was a definite step up from Domino’s and Papa John’s and I had Vace’s pizza and a Peroni a couple of times a week. It was at Vace’s where one of the pizza makers informed me of the pizza in New York, of the first American pizzeria, Lombardi’s, and other tidbits about the history of pizza in America. The seeds for another food journey were sown.
Years later, Marvin Shanken’s other magazine endeavor, The Wine Spectator, continued the curiosity for good food and drink. And it is this rabbit hole which is perhaps the deepest of all to fall down. There may not be a single food or beverage item that intertwines history, nature and passion as much as wine. Curious to understand more, I studied, signed up for and passed the Introductory Course & Exam offered by the Court of Master Sommeliers. Among the many good wines I tasted were a couple which represented a good portion of the cost of the class itself. I will never forget the first taste of a Montrachet Grand Cru. I had yet to have a Chardonnay I really liked and here was one which brought me to my knees! Overall, I was humbled by the classes and realized how much I do not know, nor would ever know, compared to people in the business like Baltimore’s Tony Foreman or Jen Burger at Bin 604. However, it is another journey most definitely worth taking and enjoying as much as I can. Next step is taking the Certified Sommelier Exam.
Char!
Trying to make great pizza at home is something I had not previously tried to accomplish, as I always realized my standard 550° kitchen oven was not hot enough to make exceptional pizza. After talking with two neighborhood residents who were making pizza at home, I decided to give it a whirl and have been pleasantly surprised with the ongoing experiments. My Sicilian style improves with each try and I feel is already much better than all but a handful of commercially available versions….and I am still a ways from where I want it to be! My Neapolitan inspired and New York style pizzas need a lot of work.
Trying to make great pizza at home makes me truly appreciate how artisan a product great pizza is and how difficult it is to make well on a consistentbasis. It seems the more and more I learn, the more and more I realize how little I know about the technical intricacies of making great pizza (amalyse enzymes and the impact of naturally present protease anyone?), not to mention acquiring the all important “feel” which ultimately guides one along. Mrs. Blogger has given me the green light to build my own Neapolitan domed, wood-fired, brick pizza oven if we ever move out of the inner-city and have an actual yard to build it in, so the road is set to unwind for a long time to come.
I love good food and drink made by passionate people and learning the history behind them. I am not an expert on any one food topic and there are many people who know much more than I ever will — I simply enjoy the pleasures of eating good food in the company of good people, which to me is ultimately the most important thing.
Very few of us could ever have imagined how quickly many people would be able to easily find and purchase a beer like Chimay, know where it is from and know how to correctly pronounce it (the Ch is pronounced “Sh”). The explosion in the popularity of hand crafted beer, spirits, cigars, wines and gourmet food items of all sorts has been quite remarkable. We are literally awash in an abundance of products made by people committed to delivering the best possible product they can. And the ongoing renaissance in American cuisine continues to impact the pizza industry, lifting the standardized pie closer to the elemental and proud tradition from which it came from, first in Napoli, then in New York City and beyond. There is still so much more to enjoy and discover and the joy is most definitely in the journey!
I grew up in the Washington DC suburbs, lived on Capitol Hill for a couple of years and have now been in Baltimore for nine years. I enjoy living with my wife and dog in Baltimore City, spending time with family and friends, travel, music, movies, poker, watching sports (college football, college basketball, soccer, hockey, horse racing, golf and mixed martial arts) reading about economics, finance and some fictional works, being a wanna be gardener and being an occasional wanna be cook (the Italian half of my blood keeps pushing me back into Marcella Hazan’s classic cookbook and the English half just wants to make a bloody good fish and chips!).
